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Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Rumanian Jews and Aktion Reinhard

Author: Jonathan Harrison

The attempted extermination of Rumanian Jews began as an ad-hoc series of killings in summer 1941. By September 1942, it was folded into a plan to send 200,000 of them to the Aktion Reinhard camps [documented in T/1284 here.). This plan only failed because Antonescu got cold feet and reneged on his promises. Most of the relevant documentation was known by the time of the Eichmann trial and is discussed below.On August 7, 1941, Einsatzkommando 11A reported that "551 Jews have been liquidated in Kishinev” (sources: EM 45 and here). Hitler knew of these killings because he had sight of such reports yet he stated on August 19th that:

As for the Jewish question, today in any case one could say that a man like Antonescu, for example, proceeds much more radically in this manner than we have done until now. But I will not rest or be idle until we too have gone all the way with the Jews (Goebbels diary, 19/8/41).

The deportation of Rumanian Jews from Transnistria to RK Ukraine was specifically ruled out until all military operations had ceased:

Deportation of Jews from Transnistria: Their deportation across the Bug is not possible at the moment.For this reason, they should be concentrated in concentration camps and put to work until it is possible to move them to the East after the [military] operations are completed [T/1002]

Clearly such operations never were completed and this is the context of Eichmann's complaint of April 14, 1942, concerning the wild expulsions of Rumanian Jews across the border [T/1013].

Events in summer 1942 are best illustrated by a telex received by Luther from Rintelen quoting a report by the Chief of the Security Police and the SD, dated July 26, 1942, addressed to Himmler, on the situation with regard to deportation of Jews from Rumania. This stated that Jews would be sent to Distrikt Lublin and non-working Jews would be “subjected to special treatment” [source: T/1023]. This was followed by the conference chaired by Klemm in September that produced the document that was subsequently published in French in Bucharest in 1944 in the version shown here. Klemm's document mentions Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka by name and also gives the route for Rumanian Jews as including Sniatyn. This routing was doubly significant because the Sniatyn ghetto was liquidated on September 7, 1942, the same month that Rumanian deportations to Lublin had originally been scheduled.

In the meantime, Eichmann's office also attempted to prevent the emigration of Rumanian Jewish children to Palestine [T/1049 and T/1056].

There can therefore be no doubt that the destination of Rumanian Jews in September 1942 was to be the Lublin region containing the death camps. Contrary to the ludicrous babblings of Kues here, these Jews were not going to be resettled in Ukraine.